Live to Eat

The acclaimed chef and author of How to Roast a Lamb offers a simple strategy for healthy cooking, highlighting the ease, deliciousness, and proven benefits of the Mediterranean diet.

Doctors have extolled the virtues of the Mediterranean diet for decades, but no chef has given home cooks the recipes they’ll want to make again and again–until now. In Live to Eat, Michael Psilakis modernizes the food of his heritage to prove that clean, healthy meals can also be comforting and easy to prepare.

Cooking the Mediterranean way means deliciousness, not deprivation: a nearly endless array of satisfying weeknight meals for your family can start with just seven easy-to-find staples, from Greek yogurt to simple tomato sauce.

What's Inside

reader reviews

Praise

"I have a few hundred cookbooks, but only one Greek cookbook... So it's a good thing I now have celebrity chef Michael Psilakis' new book Live to Eat: Cooking the Mediterranean Way... [it's] strikingly simple."—Eater

"Rather than ignore his professional chef status in order to gain trust from home cooks, Psilakis takes inspiration from it, using his experience to craft a brilliantly-structured Mediterranean cookbook. He focuses on restaurant-grade prep work-specifically in terms of seven key ingredients, which he uses as building blocks for subsequent recipes in the book. Because when you have blanched vegetables and tomato sauce on hand-two of Psilakis' all-important base ingredients-weeknight dinners of sauteed pork tenderloin or cinnamon-scented cauliflower with tomato soup can become a habit."—Tasting Table

"It's easier to cook a healthy meal when you have good ingredients on hand....With Psilakis' convenient staples at the ready, readers can comfortably whip up gratifying, feel-good meals.... [and] with an eye toward efficiency, Psilakis always notes when recipe components can be prepared in advance, frozen, or substituted for store-bought shortcuts."—Library Journal

"If anyone deserves credit for raising Greek food in the U.S. from its hidebound tropes of flaming cheese and gyros, it's chef Psilakis...He has developed a style of cooking that is not just Greek but encompasses the cooking found all along the Mediterranean coastline... [and] readily crosses boundaries in his cooking. A good choice for ethnic-foods collections."—Booklist